WIRED UK: Column 06

…in Thunderbirds, Jeff Tracy is an eccentric billionaire, able to convert his private Caribbean island into a secret cosmodrome for exotic aircraft and a re-usable space vessel, with enough scratch left over to support a cutting-edge skunkworks lab, servants and an inexhaustible volume of vermouth. Are you a government minister despairing over the seemingly unsolvable need to get kids interested in science? Thunderbirds says that science is awesome because you get to fly in space and live on a high-tech island full of booze. Beat that for incentive.

Thunderbirds utterly entranced me as a tot. Had my mom sew me a hat and sash out of blue burlap. Got my hands on a few of the models . . . I remember building Thunderbird One on a table in a bar, which was the closest I got to quality time with my father.

Last year I bought the “Best of” DVD collection. Amazingly, the episodes on it were the ones I best remember. I passed the set on to a college friend who has kids; they reportedly loved it.